Would they need to be that smart? Ambush predators that stay in roughly one area, for example, could naturally grow their numbers in the area around such a chokepoint simply by virtue of the ones in that area having more food available and therefore better survival chances.
Far less friendly, aliens in my empires tend to get marginalized to basic resource planets and banned from growing their population because my primary species is more optimized for research output. Also my most common ascension path is bio-ascension, which federation humans would find very illegal since it’s primarily genetic augmentation.
My Stellaris empires always end up starting more like the vulcans with a focus on science and mostly peaceful exploration, and end up a society of soul-crushing academia that will compromise their own sanity, values and safety for any chance at powerful or dangerous knowledge, ruling over a collection of random protectorates that they maintain for little reason other than diplomatic influence and to have someone to lord their vastly supervisor tech over.
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
I think something to consider is the sheer timescale that evolving civilization implies, evolution takes a very long time, and as far as we know nothing else on earth quite is as smart as humans. That means that another species on earth developing civilization implies one of three things:
That we will have been interacting in some form with their ancestors as they evolve intelligence for a very long time, and so their civilization will have evolved with and probably around ours, rather than completely separately, meaning that they probably won’t be a separate civilization so much as we’d have a shared one, or at least a loosely connected one. (Like if over the next several thousand years, some octopus was to slowly get smarter and eventually evolve to civilization, they’d do so in an ocean littered with human artifacts and shaped by human activity, and they might even need some of this stuff in some way, like maybe they develop metalworking by shaping bits of metal in shipwrecks and garbage rather than extracting it from rocks for example.)
That they already were intelligent in a way similar to humans, with language and other such things needed to develop civilization, without us knowing, but simply had not invented it yet (like humans were until around 10000 years or so ago, most of our history as a species). In this case, I don’t think just leaving them to their own devices without contact is a great idea, because they’ll probably have an extremely bad view of humans (we don’t tend to treat wild animals all that well, and especially the more intelligent ones, which we have often hunted for food or to remove competition, and they’re probably going to have a whole lot of stories and oral history about us as a result.) Since they haven’t been able to really do much in retaliation (to the point we didn’t even recognize them trying), they’ll probably think of us less as just rivals and more like unstoppable monsters to be avoided at all costs. This kind of view is basically setting us up for conflict with them later on, and will take a lot of work to address given how ingrained it probably is with their culture, so both communication and helping them out with early civilization problems that we’ve already solved is probably a good idea for peaceful relations later.
Finally, the third possibly is that they are able to suddenly become intelligent and develop civilization because we made them that way, ie, they’re either AIs of some sort, or an intelligent species we engineered, or an existing species like dolphins or such who’s intelligence we have artificially enhanced (in science fiction this is often called uplifting). In this case, their civilization is intrinsically linked with ours from the start, and if they happen to need some of our technology to exist (ie, like machines need manufacturing equipment to make more of themselves, or maybe an artificially enhanced creature needs some kind of drug to get the intelligence enhancing effect or something) then making their own civilization without help from ours in at least giving them that tech isn’t even possible. It’s possible they might still want to go out and found their own government or something, but such a thing is less like a wholely separate civilization and more like just a new country, at least at first, and so probably should be treated as such.
I’ve vaguely heard of them but not really looked into what makes them different from any other conventional razor. I might consider trying one I suppose.
I’ve always used electric shavers, as I greatly prefer not having to deal with constantly buying replacement blades for the more traditional kind. I’ve had my suspicions that maybe the vibration has something to do with it, but I’ve no idea how it would do so.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that I very consistently (as in, nearly 100% of the time) get hiccups while shaving, almost always whenever I get to the parts under my chin or the sides of my neck, with the severity getting worse the longer it takes me to do those areas. I’m kinda curious why that might happen, especially if hiccups have to do with food (I obviously don’t eat anything while shaving). Every time I’ve asked someone about this when the topic of hiccups comes up somewhere, they’ve told me this doesn’t happen to them and have never heard of it being a thing, so maybe I’m just weird that way? Kinda frustrating tbh as I’ve yet to find a way to prevent it.
Personally I don’t think I’ve noticed this. Things devolving into political discussions, sure, but that’s par for the course with social media I imagine. I had assumed you meant the prevalence of Linux stuff on the all feed.
There are plenty of other communities people made, just most didn’t become very active. If the Linux memes are everywhere, it’s because those are the people actually active here
I mean, no one instance is really going to be that viable a competitor on its own, isn’t the entire point of fedi platforms that what you get is an amalgamation of all (or at least most, after considering defederation) of them?